Happy Birthday to me!! Dreamcatcher Animatic with Color and Music

               


Happy Birthday to me!! My birthday present to myself is to finish my animatic...The music which was written and composed by Ashkan Tabrizi and David Semien is beautiful and really ties everything together. Hopefully soon I'll be able to upload the fully animated short. But for now... here is a sneak peak. Enjoy!!

Oh and to the anonymous Sarah that asked me if I sell prints of my work.... Yes I do. I just dont know how to reach you. Please email me your contact info to .... raquel.o.martinez@gmail.com

Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Happy Quanza! Happy Holidays!

Final #1 completed - Model an interior using Maya

Thanks to all of you that were able to come to Ave 50 Studios on Saturday!!! It was a lot of fun. Thanks for all of your wonderful support. I got to see a lot of you I havent seen in a while and got to meet many very interesting people. It was packed!!

Well after the show on Saturday and after having a lovely supper with friends I came home to the list of Finals that are due this week. First on the list was my Maya Project for my Intro to Maya class.  I never thought I was any good with Maya but I have really surprised myself. Our final was to model an interior from a photograph and color and texture with lighting and everything.

Of course, I chose a very challenging room with a tub and the dreaded CURTAINS. Here's the finished product. Oh and yes I did model the curtains myself.

This is the finished model painted with lighting

This is the photo I used as reference

OMG!!! Finals week and I'm trying to stay calm and Latest Dreamcather Character Designs and Ashkan Tabrizi from Choice of Chance

So I went to the chiropractor at school and they told me that the bones in my neck were going in all sorts of directions. They said it was probably due to stress and fatigue. Well yeah! I have been stressing all semester. I took on 5 classes plus an internship and have really just been staying afloat, but you know what, I have a lot of work under my belt now. Which is GREAT!

So to the good stuff... I just almost finished the ALMOST FINAL character designs for "Dreamcatcher." So here's the latest....

Oh oh ... the animatic is almost done and my really great friend Ashkan Tabrizi from the band CHOICE OF CHANCE is composing a score for it. I already heard some sketches and seriously... The music is AMAZING!!!!

I have always been a fan of Ashkan's music and the fact that he is composing the score for my short is such an honor.

Make sure to check out his music @
http://choiceofchance.bandcamp.com/album/real-life-make-believe 

Ojibwa woman - "Mother"

Ojibwa woman- "Medicine Woman"

"Little Boy"

Dreamcatcher - New Mom Design

While developing the characters for "Dreamcatcher" I found that the 3 character designs for the Mom, baby and Medicine Woman were not compatible stylisticly. So I've had to make a few changes... Here is the new character design for the Mom... I'll be posting new colored baby and Medicine Woman designs shortly.

"Driven By Content" Exhibition in December!!! Come see my work!

hey guys!!! Some of my pieces will be exhibited in December @ Avenue 50 Gallery

Opening reception will be on December 10th @7pm Here's the info...

Dreamcatcher - backgrounds for animatic

Hi there! So in my last post I talked about how much I LOOOOVE creating backgrounds!!! Its so much fun! I love to explore environments with color and mood. "Dreamcatcher" is kind of a scary story. The fact that most of it takes place in the little boy's dreams, let me really have some fun!!! Some of these BG's are a little rough. Again, they are for my animatic...

Dreamcatcher -backgrounds and concept

Ive come to understand that I looooove doing backgrounds and am having tons of fun with the story in development.

In October, I was chosen to participate my work for a Dreamworks Visual Development Critique. Well the fact that "I" was chosen humbles me and I was honored to be a part of it. Kathy Altieri from DW critiqued my work and gave me a lot of good pointers. I have about a month from now to revise my work as I will be presenting it again in Spring. Here is the work that I presented...

Native Ojibwe Mother designs

Nightmare concept design for forest

These are still in progress and I'll post the revised pieces at a later date.

These first concept designs have been essential in the design process for this story. Since I started talking about how much I love backgrounds, I'll be posting the backgrounds I'm using in my animatic.

Dreamcatcher- Boy expressions

I am developing a story about a little Ojibwe boy who goes on an adventure in his dreams. I'll be posting more on this story later but for now here are my studies for the little boys poses and expressions. He's going to be going on quite an adventure so I really need to study and practice his movements.

maya animation

Its been nuts that's all I gotta say. Life is very unexpected. Havent posted but I'll be posting a whole bunch of stuff soon... heres a maya animation I just worked on. Very new to the 3d world so dont be too hard on me. :)

Designing a book cover ~ The Hobbit

 I love The Hobbit and always wanted to do some concept work for the book. I know I cant compare to the Hildebrandt brothers, but for my class assignment I gave it a try...

After trying out 3 different compositions... I thought this one was the strongest.

 

These are preliminary sketches illustrating some key moments in the book.

Magic Card

Last weeks assignment was to develop an illustration for a Magic Card.  Here's the information I was given...
Art description:
Location:your choice
Action: An older, weathered human battlemage clenches his jaw and looks at his fist as a pale yellow green light shoots from between his knuckles_ he has "caught and crushed" a spell.
Focus: the spell being squashed (not the mage, the action)
Mood: That's enough foolishness
Notes: keep camera tight and focus on the quashed spell so this doesnt look like a creature card.

here are some sketches and the finished product.

concept art

Here are examples of concept work. One is an interior, a garage and a futuristic city.

Matte Painting

So I took a matte painting class with the amazing Bruno Werneck. I don't think I really knew what I was getting myself into because in that class I totally felt out of my element.

Usually my work tends to have a painterly feel to it, which I believe has been acquired because of my fine art background. Now Matte Painting is totally different because there is no room for being painterly in this type of work. Matte painting is a painted representation of a landscape, set, or distant location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that would otherwise be too expensive or impossible to build or visit. So basically it should be realistic looking. The objective of a matte painting is to make the viewer believe that this place is real.

So the assignments for this class were to develop a painting using photographs and tools in photoshop to unite these images with appropriate lighting in order to get a realistic environment.


Here are my attempts at matte painting:

Star Wars Cantina Dude

This week in my digital illustration class, the assignment was to come up An illustration of a character that would fit in at the star wars cantina. This is my cantina guy drinking some vino.

study of star wars charaters

Internships and their perks

This summer, I've had the privelege to intern at Film Roman Inc. Every Tuesday they provide a live model for their employees for figure drawing. Yesterday was the first day I attended and wow was I pleasantly surprised. First of all its very intimate, which I cannot say for other figure drawing classes, where I have to stand on something in order to see the model. Also, I was sitting next to the amazing artists Paul Wee and Joe Wack. Paul was nice enough to spend a couple minutes and give me some pointers... and he inspired me to use ink for my drawings.

Feeling inspired by the talent around me last night, I decided to draw some figures of my own when I got home. And I used ink. I keep repeating to myself something Paul told me to remember. "Gesture is everything, if your drawing feels off, then its probably the gesture..."

Concept design for city destroyed by robots...

Concept sketch - church interior

REAL OLD WORK

OMG!!! I just came across a whole bunch of work that I haven't seen in a while. I thought I had lost these photos, but  I'm soooo glad I found them and am able to share with you. I think some of it is from 1999. Well here it is. Enjoy!

"The Kiss" Acrylic on Canvas

"The Kiss" detail

 2D Design --- Groovy pattern...

2D Design exercise - acrylic on bristol

"Potrait of Pam" -- acrylic on canvas

The drawing below was done on a huge piece of paper... All I remember is having to drag it up and down stairs in my dorm in NYC when I studied at Parsons...

 As you can tell by the clip on the right... its pretty big. sorry for the bad photo...